Some years ago I started to organize monthly Carcassonne public game nights (with a help of local Carcassonne distributor), where everyone can come and play the game with any number of expansions, as well as annual tournaments with expansions. My second favorite game is Ticket to Ride. Then an idea came to my mind: why I can't organize also Ticket to Ride game nights? I have almost all expansion maps, I can use the same place (kebab restaurant), all I have to do is to arrange base game sets from local distributor (which differs from Carcassonne distributor).
In November, 2016 on one of the Carcassonne game nights I shared this idea with community, and they took it very positively, one of them even wanted to help me with organization. I had a meeting with TtR local distributor and their representative was very nice and forthcoming: he gave me 2 USA sets, 2 Europe sets and 1 Rails&Sails set for my game nights.
In January I had first game night, we had 30 people and 16 games! In February we had even more - 34 people! Since then I have two regular monthly public events - Carcassonne and Ticket to Ride game nights.
In April I had a message from Latvian Railway Museum, which offered their place for tournament organization, with no rent fee. Is there any better place for such tournament?! This would be the first tournament with expansions (in Latvia), not only USA and Europe, I used all my available maps. Also I developed special tournament format, which is fair using different expansion maps. So the TtR tournament took place just last Saturday in this venue, but the final game was held inside the real restored 1920's carriage (dark green on the website).
1st place received Ticket to Ride Rails&Sails, 2nd - 50 EUR gift card to a boardgame shop, 3rd - 30 EUR gift card. Plus some prizes from Railway museum, for example, a ride with a handcar
This was a great event! The only minor thing is amount of participants: 50 registered, but only 32 actually came, so I needed to adapt the format in real time. But anyway, this was fun! After 3 games in preliminary round only 6 players left in the semifinals, 2 of them were unbeaten. Those unbeaten players won their SF and advanced to final. Then only one left unbeaten
Here are two photo-albums from the event: one and two.
And, like with Carcassonne tournaments, this event actually will become annual Now I can tell that I am responsible for whole Ticket to Ride Latvian community